The Left Conveniently Embraces ‘All Lives Matter’

By Tal Fortgang

Saturday, November 11, 2023

 

In 2016, when the Black Lives Matter movement was in its infancy, Vox published an article called “Why you should stop saying ‘all lives matter,’ explained in 9 different ways.” The argument, expressed in prose, comic-strip, and video form, would soon become a platitude on the progressive left: The incantation “black lives matter” distinguishes that group from all others, asserting “that black people’s lives are relatively undervalued in the US. . . . The country needs to recognize that inequity to bring an end to it.” Consequently, the phrase “all lives matter” was not as innocuous as it sounded. It was deemed a denial of the special suffering of black Americans; one Black Lives Matter activist even called it a racial slur.

 

In offices and campuses across the country, it quickly became common knowledge that appealing to universal principles when a particular group is suffering was not acceptable — and probably a sign of latent bigotry.

 

Add the taboo against saying “all lives matter” to the growing list of hypocrisies revealed in the aftermath of Hamas’s atrocities in Israel. Even with throngs shouting “Gas the Jews” in Australia, Stars of David graffitied on Jewish homes in Europe, and spiking anti-Jewish hate crimes in the United States, prominent liberals and progressives have been unable to say that Jews deserve particular concern because they are particularly threatened.

 

In the two weeks after the October 7 massacres in Israel, reported anti-Jewish incidents in the United States increased by nearly 400 percent compared with the same period last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League. This compounds the fact that Jews have long been the religious group that suffers the most hate crimes in this country, and by a wide margin. And that’s without even accounting for the ubiquitous catchphrases heard in demonstrations across the country, such as “glory to our martyrs” — the martyrs being the Hamas rapists, murderers, and kidnappers — and “resistance by any means necessary” — resistance being the act of massacring, raping, and kidnapping Israeli civilians. Nearly all Jews hear such expressions as genocidal bloodlust. It’s not just in our heads, and it’s not mere anecdotes: FBI director Christopher Wray noted at the end of October that antisemitism in this country is reaching “historic levels.”

 

Yet even the public figures who issue boilerplate condemnations of these trends do so by condemning not just Jew-hatred but bigotries of all kinds. President Biden struck a universalist chord when he said, “We must without equivocation denounce antisemitism. We must also without equivocation denounce Islamophobia. And to all of you hurting . . . I want you to know I see you. You belong. And I want to say this to you. You’re all America.” Announcing that an individual suspected of making violent threats against Jews at Cornell University was in custody, New York governor Kathy Hochul declared that “there is zero tolerance in New York for antisemitism, Islamophobia, or hate of any kind.” The day after Wray’s warning about historic levels of antisemitism, Vice President Kamala Harris announced the advent of a “U.S. National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia in the United States,” intended, as Harris noted on social media, “to combat a surge of hate in America.” Countless other senators, governors, and public figures have followed the same script. None have been made to apologize for failing to recognize that Jews are in a uniquely precarious place.

 

What to make of this resurgent universalism? It tells us that the controversy over “all lives matter” was always make-believe; cultural elites never really meant the platitudes they repeated about focusing on those who are “undervalued” or “marginalized.” The campus clichés about ensuring that all students feel “safe” and fighting “rape culture” and the prohibition on blaming the victim — all of which have not just disappeared but been inverted as Hamas sympathizers insist on loudly “contextualizing” mass rape in front of their horrified Jewish classmates — were all pretexts for controlling the public discourse. Maintaining these shibboleths had nothing to do with any principled view of right and wrong.

 

Recognizing this cuts both ways, of course. It is not wrong to denounce Islamophobia, nor should we suspect that Biden or Hochul harbor ill will toward Jews, just as there really was nothing wrong with saying “all lives matter” all along.

 

But the bigger question is why public figures are so reluctant to denounce antisemitism, full stop. Perhaps they are afraid of backlash from those who believe that focusing solely on antisemitism will itself stoke anti-Arab or Islamophobic sentiment. If that is the case, they are concerned about a nonexistent phenomenon of Americans moved by rising antisemitism to engage in violence against other minority groups. It would be strange, to say the least.

 

Less strange but more subtle is the possibility that Jew-hatred confounds the progressive project of reducing all hatreds to simplistic stories about power. The theory of intersectional axes of oppression that has taken root in elite circles holds that all bigotries worth fighting are somehow related. Prejudice against more powerful groups is excusable (if not celebrated as “resistance”), but punching down is the worst sin possible.

 

A vulgarized version of this analysis has provided the standard for all public pronouncements when a group is targeted. If the incidents cannot be readily assimilated into the prefabricated categories of oppressor and oppressed — for instance, if Arabs or blacks are attacking Jews — the framework shifts. Everything becomes more abstract, and the culprit becomes “hate” itself, which threatens all minority groups alike. All lives matter when progressives can’t figure out who is supposed to be the good guy and who the bad guy. Thus the meaningless promises to fight “hate,” as though all hatreds are somehow expressions of the same phenomenon.

 

Clearly, they are not. Jew-hatred, the world’s oldest and most resilient bigotry, defies such reductive analysis because it really is just about the Jews. People around the world hate Jews for whatever reason is nearest to hand. Jews are hated for being too rich, too poor, too rooted in their homeland, not rooted enough, and so on. Jew-hatred does not just resist explanation under the dominant progressive framework. It is fully sui generis — in a class by itself. But admitting that would be tantamount to conceding that the dominant progressive framework for analyzing world events, which is fixated on power and oppression, is hopelessly flawed.

 

So while antisemitism may be about the Jews, downplaying it with all-lives-matter-ism is about something else entirely: preserving the shaky foundation beneath a host of progressive social movements. Giving up the analytical basis for all those other projects in order to confront spiking antisemitism appears to be too great a price for progressives to bear.